Since day one in dental school, I knew I wanted to be a member of ASDA. I had heard so much about how it advocates for students, helps mold leadership skills and provides a community of students going through the same challenges you are going through who help each other. Being part of the University of Puerto Rico’s ASDA chapter, I felt a sense of belonging and community from the start.
The United States declared a nationwide state of emergency mid-March as a result of the global pandemic that still affects us today. At Harvard, a delicate balancing act of ensuring the safety of all community members while optimizing education and patient care began.
As a three-year Give Kids A Smile (GKAS) Day co-coordinator, I had a clear vision of what our annual event on March 28, 2020, was going to look like. I would have never guessed a global pandemic would jeopardize the event itself and dental school life as I knew it.
During ASDA’s 2019 Annual Session, Meharry ASDA received the “Outstanding Community Outreach” Gold Crown Award. One of the largest and most influential programs our student leaders have implemented on campus is our Meharry Oral Health Day.
November is ASDA’s Advocacy Month, which means that chapters across the country are busy planning and executing plenty of lunch and learns and ADPAC drives. It is events like these where students learn about issues important in dentistry and how they can become more involved, spreading awareness about the issues that impact dentistry the most.
Our ASDA chapter at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston recently hosted 40 predental students from South Carolina and Georgia, representing over a dozen universities, in our most successful predental day yet. There is never a true formula to success, but we would like to share our tips to help other chapters when planning events for predental students.
In dentistry, there is a constant battle between the mass consumption of disposables and environmental sustainability. As health care professionals, we not only have an obligation to the oral well-being of our patients but also to the well-being of the environment surrounding them.
